THIS WAY, AND THAT
The parlor blinds were shut, and all
the windows of the third-story rooms were shaded;
but the pantry window, looking out on a long low shed,
such as city houses have to keep their wood in and
to dry their clothes upon, was open; and out at this
window had come two little girls, with quiet steps
and hushed voices, and carried their books and crickets
to the very further end, establishing themselves there,
where the shade of a tall, round fir tree, planted
at the foot of the yard below, fell across the building
of a morning.
“It was prettier down on the
bricks,” Luclarion had told them. But they
thought otherwise.
“Luclarion doesn’t know,”
said Frank. “People don’t know
things, I think. I wonder why, when they’ve
got old, and ought to? It’s like the sea-shore
here, I guess, only the stones are all stuck down,
and you mustn’t pick up the loose ones either.”
Frank touched lightly, as she spoke,
the white and black and gray bits of gravel that covered
the flat roof.
“And it smells like the pine forests!”
The sun was hot and bright upon the
fir branches and along the tar-cemented roof.
“How do you know about sea-shores
and pine forests?” asked Laura, with crushing
common sense.
“I don’t know; but I do,” said Frank.
“You don’t know anything
but stories and pictures and one tree, and a little
gravel, all stuck down tight.”
“I’m glad I’ve got
one tree. And the rest of it, why listen!
It’s in the word, Laura. Forest.
Doesn’t that sound like thousands of them, all
fresh and rustling? And Ellen went to the sea-shore,
in that book; and picked up pebbles; and the sea came
up to her feet, just as the air comes up here, and
you can’t get any farther,” said
Frank, walking to the very edge and putting one foot
out over, while the wind blew in her face up the long
opening between rows of brick houses of which theirs
was in the midst upon one side.
“A great sea!” exclaimed
Laura, contemptuously. “With all those
other wood-sheds right out in it, all the way down!”
“Well, there’s another
side to the sea; and capes, and islands,” answered
Frank, turning back. “Besides, I don’t
pretend it is; I only think it seems a little
bit like it. I’m often put in mind of things.
I don’t know why.”
“I’ll tell you what it
is like,” said Laura. “It’s
like the gallery at church, where the singers stand
up in a row, and look down, and all the people look
up at them. I like high places. I like Cecilia,
in the ‘Bracelets,’ sitting at the top,
behind, when her name was called out for the prize;
and ’they all made way, and she was on the floor
in an instant.’ I should like to have been
Cecilia!”
“Leonora was a great deal the best.”
“I know it; but she don’t stand out.”
“Laura! You’re just
like the Pharisees! You’re always wishing
for long clothes and high seats!”
“There ain’t any Pharisees,
nowadays,” said Laura, securely. After
which, of course, there was nothing more to be insisted.
Mrs. Lake, the housekeeper, came to
the middle upper window, and moved the blind a little.
Frank and Laura were behind the fir. They saw
her through the branches. She, through the farther
thickness of the tree, did not notice them.
“That was good,” said
Laura. “She would have beckoned us in.
I hate that forefinger of hers; it’s always
hushing or beckoning. It’s only two inches
long. What makes us have to mind it so?”
“She puts it all into those
two inches,” answered Frank. “All
the must there is in the house. And then
you’ve got to.”
“I wouldn’t if father wasn’t
sick.”
“Laura,” said Frank, gravely,
“I don’t believe father is going to get
well. What do you suppose they’re letting
us stay at home from school for?”
“O, that,” said Laura,
“was because Mrs. Lake didn’t have time
to sew the sleeves into your brown dress.”
“I could have worn my gingham,
Laura. What if he should die pretty soon?
I heard her tell Luclarion that there must be a change
before long. They talk in little bits, Laura,
and they say it solemn.”
The children were silent for a few
minutes. Frank sat looking through the fir-tree
at the far-off flecks of blue.
Mr. Shiere had been ill a long time.
They could hardly think, now, what it would seem again
not to have a sick father; and they had had no mother
for several years, many out of their short
remembrance of life. Mrs. Lake had kept the house,
and mended their clothes, and held up her forefinger
at them. Even when Mr. Shiere was well, he had
been a reserved man, much absorbed in business since
his wife’s death, he had been a very sad man.
He loved his children, but he was very little with
them. Frank and Laura could not feel the shock
and loss that children feel when death comes and robs
them suddenly of a close companionship.
“What do you suppose would happen
then?” asked Laura, after awhile. “We
shouldn’t be anybody’s children.”
“Yes, we should,” said Frank; “we
should be God’s.’
Everybody else is that, besides,”
said Laura.
“We shall have black silk pantalets
again, I suppose,” she began, afresh,
looking down at her white ones with double crimped
ruffles, “and Mrs. Gibbs will come
in and help, and we shall have to pipe and overcast.”
“O, Laura, how nice it was ever
so long ago!” cried Frank, suddenly, never heeding
the pantalets, “when mother sent us out to ask
company to tea, that pleasant Saturday,
you know, and made lace pelerines for our
dolls while we were gone! It’s horrid, when
other girls have mothers, only to have a housekeeper!
And pretty soon we sha’n’t have anything,
only a little corner, away back, that we can’t
hardly recollect.”
“They’ll do something
with us; they always do,” said Laura, composedly.
The children of this world, even as
children, are wisest in their generation. Frank
believed they would be God’s children; she could
not see exactly what was to come of that, though, practically.
Laura knew that people always did something; something
would be sure to be done with them. She was not
frightened; she was even a little curious.
A head came up at the corner of the
shed behind them, a pair of shoulders, high,
square, turned forward; a pair of arms, long thence
to the elbows, as they say women’s are who might
be good nurses of children; the hands held on to the
sides of the steep steps that led up from the bricked
yard. The young woman’s face was thin and
strong; two great, clear, hazel eyes looked straight
out, like arrow shots; it was a clear, undeviating
glance; it never wandered, or searched, or wavered,
any more than a sunbeam; it struck full upon whatever
was there; it struck through many things that
were transparent to their quality. She had square,
white, strong teeth, that set together like the faces
of a die; they showed easily when she spoke, but the
lips closed over them absolutely and firmly.
Yet they were pleasant lips, and had a smile in them
that never went quite out; it lay in all the muscles
of the mouth and chin; it lay behind, in the living
spirit that had moulded to itself the muscles.
This was Luclarion.
“Your Aunt Oldways and Mrs. Oferr have come.
Hurry in!”
Now Mrs. Oldways was only an uncle’s
wife; Mrs. Oferr was their father’s sister.
But Mrs. Oferr was a rich woman who lived in New York,
and who came on grand and potent, with a scarf or a
pair of shoe-bows for each of the children in her
big trunk, and a hundred and one suggestions for their
ordering and behavior at her tongue’s end, once
a year. Mrs. Oldways lived up in the country,
and was “aunt” to half the neighborhood
at home, and turned into an aunt instantly, wherever
she went and found children. If there were no
children, perhaps older folks did not call her by the
name, but they felt the special human kinship that
is of no-blood or law, but is next to motherhood in
the spirit.
Mrs. Oferr found the open pantry window,
before the children had got in.
“Out there!” she exclaimed,
“in the eyes of all the neighbors in the circumstances
of the family! Who does, or don’t
look after you?”
“Hearts’-sake!”
came up the pleasant tones of Mrs. Oldways from behind,
“how can they help it? There isn’t
any other out-doors. If they were down at Homesworth
now, there’d be the lilac garden and the old
chestnuts, and the seat under the wall. Poor little
souls!” she added, pitifully, as she lifted
them in, and kissed them. “It’s well
they can take any comfort. Let ’em have
all there is.”
Mrs. Oferr drew the blinds, and closed the window.
Frank and Laura remembered the strangeness
of that day all their lives. How they sat, shy
and silent, while Luclarion brought in cake and wine;
how Mrs. Oferr sat in the large morocco easy-chair
and took some; and Mrs. Oldways lifted Laura, great
girl as she was, into her lap first, and broke a slice
for her; how Mrs. Oldways went up-stairs to Mrs. Lake,
and then down into the kitchen to do something that
was needed; and Mrs. Oferr, after she had visited her
brother, lay down in the spare chamber for a nap, tired
with her long journey from New York, though it had
been by boat and cars, while there was a long staging
from Homesworth down to Nashua, on Mrs. Oldways’
route. Mrs. Oldways, however, was “used,”
she said, “to stepping round.” It
was the sitting that had tired her.
How they were told not to go out any
more, or to run up and down-stairs; and how they sat
in the front windows, looking out through the green
slats at so much of the street world as they could
see in strips; how they obtained surreptitious bits
of bread from dinner, and opened a bit of the sash,
and shoved out crumbs under the blinds for the pigeons
that flew down upon the sidewalk; how they wondered
what kind of a day it was in other houses, where there
were not circumstances in the family, where children
played, and fathers were not ill, but came and went
to and from their stores; and where two aunts had
not come, both at once, from great ways off, to wait
for something strange and awful that was likely to
befall.
When they were taken in, at bedtime,
to kiss their father and say good-night, there was
something portentous in the stillness there; in the
look of the sick man, raised high against the pillows,
and turning his eyes wistfully toward them, with no
slightest movement of the head; in the waiting aspect
of all things, the appearance as of everybody
being to sit up all night except themselves.
Edward Shiere brought his children close to him with the
magnetism of that look; they bent down to receive his kiss and his good-night,
so long and solemn. He had not been in the way of talking to them about religion
in his life. He had only insisted on their truth and obedience; that was the
beginning of all religion. Now it was given him in the hour of his death what he
should speak; and because he had never said many such words to them before, they
fell like the very touch of the Holy Ghost upon their young spirits now,
“Love God, and keep His commandments. Good-by.”
In the morning, when they woke, Mrs.
Lake was in their room, talking in a low voice with
Mrs. Oferr, who stood by an open bureau. They
heard Luclarion dusting down the stairs.
Who was taking care of their father?
They did not ask. In the night,
he had been taken care of. It was morning with
him, now, also.
Mrs. Lake and Mrs. Oferr were calculating, about
black pantalets, and other things.
This story is not with the details
of their early orphan life. When Edward Shiere
was buried came family consultations. The two
aunts were the nearest friends. Nobody thought
of Mr. Titus Oldways. He never was counted.
He was Mrs. Shiere’s uncle, Aunt Oldways’
uncle-in-law, therefore, and grand-uncle to these children.
But Titus Oldways never took up any family responsibilities;
he had been shy of them all his single, solitary life.
He seemed to think he could not drop them as he could
other things, if he did not find them satisfactory.
Besides, what would he know about two young girls?
He saw the death in the paper, and
came to the funeral; then he went away again to his
house in Greenley Street at the far West End, and
to his stiff old housekeeper, Mrs. Froke, who knew
his stiff old ways. And, turning his back on
everybody, everybody forgot all about him. Except
as now and then, at intervals of years, there broke
out here or there, at some distant point in some family
crisis, a sudden recollection from which would spring
a half suggestion, “Why, there’s Uncle
Titus! If he was only,” or, “if
he would only,” and there it ended.
Much as it might be with a housewife, who says of
some stored-away possession forty times, perhaps, before
it ever turns out available, “Why, there’s
that old gray taffety! If it were only green,
now!” or, “If there were three or four
yards more of it!”
Uncle Titus was just Uncle Titus,
neither more nor less; so Mrs. Oferr and Aunt Oldways
consulted about their own measures and materials;
and never reckoned the old taffety at all. There
was money enough to clothe and educate; little more.
“I will take home one,” said Mrs.
Oferr, distinctly.
So, they were to be separated?
They did not realize what this was,
however. They were told of letters and visits;
of sweet country-living, of city sights and pleasures;
of kittens and birds’ nests, and the great barns;
of music and dancing lessons, and little parties, “by-and-by,
when it was proper.”
“Let me go to Homesworth,” whispered Frank
to Aunt Oldways.
Laura gravitated as surely to the
streets and shops, and the great school of young ladies.
“One taken and the other left,”
quoted Luclarion, over the packing of the two small
trunks.
“We’re both going,”
says Laura, surprised. “One taken?
Where?”
“Where the carcass is,” answered Luclarion.
“There’s one thing you’ll
have to see to for yourselves. I can’t
pack it. It won’t go into the trunks.”
“What, Luclarion?”
“What your father said to you that night.”
They were silent. Presently Frank
answered, softly, “I hope I shan’t
forget that.”
Laura, the pause once broken, remarked,
rather glibly, that she “was afraid there wouldn’t
be much chance to recollect things at Aunt Oferr’s.”
“She isn’t exactly what
I call a heavenly-minded woman,” said Luclarion,
quietly.
“She is very much occupied,”
replied Laura, grandly taking up the Oferr style.
“She visits a great deal, and she goes out in
the carriage. You have to change your dress every
day for dinner, and I’m to take French lessons.”
The absurd little sinner was actually
proud of her magnificent temptations. She was
only a child. Men and women never are, of course.
“I’m afraid it will be
pretty hard to remember,” repeated Laura, with
condescension.
“That’s your stump!”
Luclarion fixed the steadfast arrow
of her look straight upon her, and drew the bow with
this twang.